Hi, Judy Petersen and interested others on HaSafran list: I don’t know if you (Judy) were at the AJL Conference in LA in 2019, but I gave a talk there on anti-Israel propaganda in middle-grade and YA fiction, in which I addressed specifically the noxious anti-Israel propaganda in Elizabeth Laird’s *A Little Piece of Ground.* You can find my take on several of these books in the Proceedings on the AJL website. Go to Past Conferences and Proceedings, then click on 2019 Conference Proceedings and scroll down to “Literature or Propaganda? How They Write About the Arab Israeli Conflict” (Marjorie Gann).
Regarding *A Little Piece of Ground* in particular, I’m pasting to the end
of this email an expanded analysis of what I said at the Conference, from a
longer paper I’ve been working on.
But let me say this: Of all the books I analyzed, Laird’s was beyond any
doubt the most vicious. It dehumanized and demonized Israeli soldiers so
that any younger reader would come away from the book unable to think of an
Israeli as a human being. The book is *toxic* and does not belong in a
public (or private!) school classroom.
In case you are entering into a prolonged battle with a school or a
teacher, I would be happy to help you with my research findings. Just email
me directly.
I examined 34 middle grade and YA books, all fiction or memoirs, in English
(some were translations from Hebrew or French). In a nutshell, I found
that, almost uniformly, the only books that attempted to show genuine
empathy to the other side were by Jews, especially Israelis, who – even
when they did a powerful job of showing Israeli suffering – bent over
backwards to show at least some empathy towards Israeli or West Bank Arabs.
(Pnina Moed Kass's *Real Time* is a fine example.) With rare exceptions
(Naomi Shihab Nye is one), the compliment was not returned. When Arab or
pro-Arab writers did deign to notice that Israelis suffered from terrorism,
it was usually in a pro-forma, mechanical fashion, as you’ll see at the end
of my analysis of the Laird book below.
I will attach to this my full bibliography, but here are a couple of books
I found particularly problematic, and which I hope will not be used in your
local school:
*The Shepherd’s Granddaughter*, by Anne Laurel Carter (Canadian author;
shows ignorance about the West Bank, especially Hebron, which is never even
acknowledged as a place of historic settlement by Jews)
*Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood*, by Ibtisam Barakat (I realize
this is a memoir, but Barakat’s memory of events distorts the history of
the Six-Day War, leaving an ignorant young reader with the impression that
the Israelis were the aggressors, without mentioning that Israel was
attacked by four enemy nations whose leaders openly declared their
genocidal intentions.)
*Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak *(Canadian author
Deborah Ellis; leaves the impression that it was Israeli government policy
to shoot at ambulances during the Second Intifada, which is false)
If you’re looking for a book that’s *obsessively balanced* and truly gives
a fair shake to both sides, you could look at Canadian Nicholas Maes’s
*Crescent
Star* (Dundurn, 2011). I didn’t address it in my talk in LA, but here’s
what I say in the article I’m working on:
The plot turns on two boys’ soccer teams, one of Israeli Jews, the other of
East Jerusalem Arabs. Their idealistic coaches bring them together to play
a series of matches.
In alternating chapters, *Crescent Star* presents each side’s perspective
through the eyes of the boys and their classmates. In a Jewish classroom,
we hear from the daughter of parents active in the left-wing NGO B’Tselem:
If the *Shoah* taught us anything, it’s that violence is evil and
counter-productive. Okay, we Jews need a refuge, great, but . . . if our
country was born from the ashes of the Holocaust, we of all peoples can’t
behave like Nazis.(52)
A boy whose father’s brigade fought terrorism on the West Bank disagrees:
“[I]t’s important to be reminded of the Holocaust because it teaches us to
be tough, and we have to be.”
In an Arab classroom, we hear out-and-out Holocaust denial:
My father says the Holocaust is a lot of crap. He says Jews control the
media and they spread this lie to hide their crimes against the Arabs. (p.
56))
A more moderate student, whose family lost their farm in ’48, chimes in:
Okay they suffered, . . . But that doesn’t mean they’re entitled to our
land. Why didn’t the Europeans pay them off? They could have carved up
Germany and let the Jews move there. (p. 56)
This meticulous attention to even-handedness reduces the
characters to ventriloquists’ dummies and drains the story of its literary
energy.
Now here’s the extract from my analysis of *A Little Piece of Ground:*
*Marjorie*
*Soldier or Monster?*
Elizabeth Laird’s* A Little Piece of Ground*, written in collaboration with
Palestinian teacher Sonia Nimr, met with controversy from the moment it was
published in Britain in 2003. Phyllis Simon, co-owner of a Vancouver,
Canada, bookstore, urged Laird’s publisher (Macmillan) to reconsider
publication of the book, pointing out that “there is not even one mildly
positive portrait of an Israeli in the entire book. . . . *A Little Piece
of Ground . . . *is for children, the overwhelming number of whom clearly
haven’t a clue about this conflict, and thus depend on books like this for
the opinions they form about what goes on in the Middle East.” (TG, p. 7)
Laird answered Simon as follows: “The book is written through the eyes of a
12-year-old who just sees men with guns. It would not have been true to my
characters to do otherwise,” she writes (Teacher’s Guide, p, 9).
But this is disingenuous: Who but the author made the decision to paint the
Middle East conflict exclusively through the eyes of a twelve-year-old Arab
boy living in Ramallah during the Second Intifada? Karim sees his father
humiliated at checkpoints; not only has he no idea why the Israelis have
set these up in the first place, it’s a question he wouldn’t think to ask.
Karim and his friends are confined inside by endless curfews which to them
seem arbitrary, and there is no voice in the novel to explain them.
Soldiers damage his school, but we don’t know why they bother to go there
in the first place. Are they just throwing their weight around, or are they
looking for stashes of weapons?
Laird doesn’t bother to tell us, but she does expend considerable stylistic
effort on painting Israeli soldiers not as the teenage boys in tanks that
they are, but as the tanks themselves:
The Israeli tank that had been squatting at the crossroads just below the
apartment block for days now had moved a few metres closer.” . . . (pp.
4-5)
“He could imagine the great armoured machines lying down there, like a row
of green scaly monsters, crouched waiting to crawl back up the hill and pin
the people of Ramallah down in their houses again . . . .” (p. 12)
Vivid images like these engage the reader’s sympathy for her Arab
characters – even for the boys’ pet kitten, flattened by an Israeli tank as
the apotheosis of Israeli cruelty. But when it comes to Israeli victims of
terrorist attacks, she is heartless:
“Since a Palestinian gunman had shot two people in an Israeli café two
weeks ago, the Israelis had set up another curfew, which meant that the
whole city had been locked down.” (p. 5)
“Israeli troops shelled a refugee camp in Gaza this morning, killing nine
Palestinians, including a three-year-old child. Five Israeli woman [sic]
died and three children were badly injured when a Palestinian gunman opened
fire in a crowded shopping street in Jerusalem this morning.”
Nor does Laird distinguish between aggressive and defensive
violence. She doesn’t care to find out *why* the IDF might have shelled
that Gaza refugee camp. In 2002, 17 rockets and 455 mortar shells were
fired at Israel from Gaza, and in 2003 there were at least 123 rockets and
514 mortars fired. [Figures from Israel Security Agency.] But to Laird,
neutralizing rockets and mortars to protect the lives of your civilian
population is morally equivalent to shooting civilians in a café.
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Bibliography Chart 7 June 2019.docx
Description: MS-Word 2007 document
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